Well, INSOMANiAC is trying to stay below £1K, and the entire system I built, including buying Win8 Pro boxed, and a small SSD OCZ vertex3(SATA3 55GB C : \). Even adjusting for the 2xHitachi Terrabyte drives I already owned(SATA2s for D : \ in RAID1) was below that £1K.

Yes, I'll need to upgrade the SSD and GPU in 2years time. But the cost of that, compared to spending it all on a overkill GPU/large SSD and buying a modern day Celeron socket board now, isn't good advice either.

@MMMarmite

The conroe system I decommissioned, I bought all the parts separately at the time with a view to overclock at end-of-life. It should have taken at least 600Mz per core, rather than 400Mhz, but the specification memory, just wouldn't stabilize in dual channel mode above 2GHz, and wouldn't be cost effective to replace. I agree, it is a big compromise for getting parts preopened/touched, but the alternative is potentially getting runt of the litter components again.

@vizzini not sure where you're finding that the 1155 socket is a "modern day Celeron socket" it's the socket of choice for current-gen Intel chips.

Runt of the litter parts will always happen due to the way the fabs bin the silicon, but on the flip you may get a chip that is more capable than expected. I would be more concerned about the strain on the motherboard when shipped with a massive heatsink installed if not correctly packaged.

@MMMarmite
Intel have done well to rebrand the mid-range chips, and lose that negative Celeron connotation.
But the Socket 2011 is definitely the Pentium class product to a Xeon (socket 1366) of today. So by the process of deduction the low power, integrated graphics, dual memory setup of socket 1155, sort means it has to be the unofficial Celeron line.

Fyi The packaging was excellent. The motherboard box was tightly secured in the main box, and packaging around the heatsink/fan was tight to take away any possible strain, if or when the box was stored on its side or end in transit.

The motherboard's own auto overclock feature took the chip upto ~4530MHz so there is still plenty of headroom. Even without manual tweaks the net gain will be around ~3600MHz over the four cores, if I need to use overclocking on it later down the line.

Well I'm sure you'll be happy with whatever you buy, just like Armoured_bears is . I'm just playing devils advocate, so you made a choice, based on balanced info of all the CPU socket architectures available.

I am intrigued by the need for a 670 option you had in your basket. When I was buying, I compromised a little on the GPU to pay for a small SSD, as the GTX 650 Ti OC with 768 cuda cores iirc seemed to be the sweetspot for price and performance, but as I'll be buying a newer mid end GPU before it becomes an issue, it wasn't too big a compromise.

I just wont it to last me at least three years with the distinct possibility of upgrading to a higher resolution and the 670 seems to be better at higher res for only a small increase in price, as for the i5 Im just keeping costs down and from what I've seen its more than enough to handle games for the forseeable future, should I need to upgrade at a later date, motherboards dont cost the earth so I should be ok

Looks like a good system, I'd make sure that speedfan supports the motherboard so you can get it nice and quiet. Otherwise get the Asus one I linked earlier.

Also, the Asus Direct CU II GPU is the quietest 670 around.

I looked at both and apparently while the Asus is the best for noise, the Gigabyte is better temp wise and as the machine wil be pretty close to a radiator in a small room I thought I'd better go down the temp road, also the Asus is 8 quid more expensive

Looks like a good system, I'd make sure that speedfan supports the motherboard so you can get it nice and quiet. Otherwise get the Asus one I linked earlier.

Also, the Asus Direct CU II GPU is the quietest 670 around.

I looked at both and apparently while the Asus is the best for noise, the Gigabyte is better temp wise and as the machine wil be pretty close to a radiator in a small room I thought I'd better go down the temp road, also the Asus is 8 quid more expensive

That case can have big 200m fans running quietly with great airflow, temperature won't be an issue.

rodpad wrote:
Did you get Speedfan working fine with the instructions I gave you Ecosse?

Hi rodpad, cheers for that.
Yes, it worked for all fans except the CPU, I had to use the ultra low noice cable and leave it at that.
It needs a few mins to settle down to the automatic low levels but then it's perfect for all fans except the CPU.
No matter what I did the CPU fan always stays at the same value.

It's silent anyway, I only hear the GPU fan when under heavy load and then it's quieter and more pleasant than my PS3.